Whistler

Patchett follows 2023’s Tom Lake with another perfectly executed and quietly profound family drama. Daphne, a 53-year-old happily married English teacher, is at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City with her husband, Jonathan, a retired hospital administrator, when she runs into Eddie Triplett, who was once her stepfather. Though he was only married to her mother, Abigail, for two years, Daphne and her sister built a life-changing amount of trust with him. Abigail and Eddie abruptly divorced following a car accident in which he and Daphne drove off the road in a snowstorm in Winchester, Mass., which resulted in nine-year-old Daphne climbing out of the wrecked car to find help. The story takes place in the weeks after her reunion with Eddie, as Daphne learns the truth of why he and her mother divorced and revisits the accident and its reverberations. Somewhere along the way, the novel becomes a meditation on mortality, long marriages, and what it means to love well. “It’s an awful business.... Loving another person,” Abigail tells Daphne, reflecting on her three marriages, each with their share of successes and failures. Daphne also reflects on how Eddie, when they were trapped in the car, told her an intense story that still haunts her, about a rancher named Mary who hovers on the brink of death after an accident. Like many of Patchett’s works, this beautiful and generous novel feels effortless, never straining for effect. It’s one of her best. (June)